"Why?"
"Well," with a shrug, "Diaz cannot—cannot control. Madero, he cannot control better dan Diaz. Los Americanos must go in."
It is a bit of a surprise to find in this little Pecos Town of adobe huts set down higgledy-piggledy a tiny stone church with stained glass windows, a little gem in a wilderness. I slipped through the doors and sat watching the sunset through the colored windows and dreaming of the devotees whose ideals had been built into the stones of these quiet walls.
Three miles lower down the valley is a still older church built in—well, they tell you all the way from 1548 and 1600 to 1700. I dare say the middle date is the nearest right. At all events, the bronze bell of this old ruin dated before 1700; and when preparations were under way for the Chicago World's Fair, these old Mission bells were so much in demand that the prices went up to $500; and the Mexicans of Pecos were so fearful of the desecrating thief that they carried this ancient bell away and buried it in the mountains—where, no man knows: it has never since been found. You have been told so often that the mountains of America lack human and historic interest that you have almost come to believe it. Does all this sound like lack of human interest? Yet it is most of it 8,000 feet above sea level, and much of it on the top of the snow peaks between ten and thirteen thousand feet up.
At eight o'clock Tuesday, April 18, I set out up the cañon with a span of stout, heavy horses, an exceptionally strong democrat wagon, and a very careful Mexican driver. To those who know mountain travel, I do not need to describe the trails up Pecos Cañon. I consider it a safer road than Broadway, New York, or Piccadilly, London; but people from Broadway or Piccadilly might not consider it so. It isn't a trail for a motor car, though the scenic highway cutting this at right angles will be when it is finished; and it isn't a trail for a fool. The pedestrian who jumps forward and then back in dodging motors on Broadway, might turn several somersaults down this trail if trying experiments in the way of jumping. The trail is just the width of the wagon, and it clings to the mountain side above the brawling waters in Pecos Cañon, now down on a level with the torrent, now high up edging round ramparts of rock sheer as a wall. You load your wagon the heavier on the inner side both going and coming; and you sit with your weight on the inner side; and the driver keeps the brakes pretty well jammed down on sharp in-curves and the horses headed close in to the wall. With care, there is no danger whatever. Lumber teams traverse the road every day. With carelessness—well, last summer a rig and span and four occupants went over the edge head first: nobody hurt, as the steep slope is heavily wooded and you can't slide far.
Ranch after ranch you pass with the little portable houses for "the tent dwellers;" and let it be emphasized that well folk must be careful how they go into quarters which tuberculous patients have had. Carry your own collapsible drinking cup. Cabins and camps of city people from Texas, from the Pacific Coast, from Europe, dot the level knolls where the big pines stand like sentinels, and the rocks shade from wind and heat, and the eddying brook encircles natural lawn in trout pools and miniature waterfalls. Wherever the cañon widens to little fields, the Mexican farmer's adobe hut stands by the roadside with an intake ditch to irrigate the farm. The road corkscrews up and up, in and out, round rock flank and rampart and battlement, where the cañon forks to right and left up other forested cañons, many of which, save for the hunter, have never known human tread. Straight ahead north there, as you dodge round the rocky abutments crisscrossing the stream at a dozen fords, loom walls and domes of snow, Baldy Pecos, a great ridge of white, the two Truchas Peaks going up in sharp summits. The road is called twenty miles as the crow flies; but this is not a trail as the crow flies. You are zigzagging back on your own track a dozen places; and there is no lie as big as the length of a mile in the mountains, especially when the wheels go over stones half their own size. Where the snow peaks rear their summits is the head of Pecos Cañon—a sort of snow top to the sides of a triangle, the Santa Fe Range shutting off the left on the west, the Las Vegas or Sangre de Christo Mountains walling in the right on the east. I know of nothing like it for grandeur in America except the Rockies round Laggan in Canada.
The Pueblo of Taos, where the houses are practically communal dwellings five stories in height